Diablo Immortal whales face massive orb debt after third-party refunds

pcgamesn.com:

Many Diablo Immortal whales – players who have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars in Blizzard’s fantasy game – are finding themselves left with massive in-game ‘debt’ after purchases made through third-party websites are revoked. Diablo Immortal’s Eternal Orbs are one of the primary currencies in the RPG game, are bought with real money, and can then be spent on various purchases in the in-game store on cosmetic items, the Diablo Immortal legendary crests used to get legendary gems from the Elder Rifts, and reforge stones used to reroll equipment bonuses.

Purchasing Eternal Orbs can cost anywhere from $0.99 USD / £0.89 GBP for just 60 up to the most expensive bundle, which offers 7200 Eternal Orbs for $99.99 USD / £89.99 GBP. For context, eternal legendary crests will set you back 160 Eternal Orbs per crest, while cosmetics tend to run between 1,000 and 1,650 Eternal Orbs depending on their category. As a result, some players say they have turned to third-party sellers offering cheap deals on orbs, with some quoting deals offering the 7200 orb bundle for prices ranging from $10-50 USD.

It appears that time has been called on many players who took advantage of these deals, however. Multiple threads on the game’s subreddit are reporting that huge numbers of players who purchased Eternal Orbs through third party sellers are now finding their accounts displaying a negative orb value when logging into the game. This typically happens when a user has refunded their in-game purchases, such as through a storefront like Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store or through their payment provider.

In this case, however, it appears that the purchases made through third-party sellers – which are likely to have been obtained